Was It Good For The Gays: ‘The Children’s Hour’

If you’re going to make a movie about queer people, you’re likely going to get a divisive response. Does it reinforce negative stereotypes? Does it provide an accurate cross-section of the diverse LGBT community? How many think pieces will it incite? In this regular column, we’ll look at depictions of queers in cinema and ask, Was It Good For The Gays? Today, a look at William Wyler’s adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play, The Children’s Hour.

Inspired by a real story of two Scottish schoolmistresses who were accused of having a lesbian affair by one of their students, Hellman’s play was first produced on the New York stage in 1934. It told the story of Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, two life-long friends who run an all-girls boarding school. One of their students, the mischievous and deceitful Mary, begs her grandmother to leave the school; she presents a simple lie: that the two women have an “unnatural” relationship and that she saw them kissing on Karen’s bed. Mary’s grandmother immediately pulls her from the school and spreads the word; Mary’s classmates’ parents soon follow suit.

Karen and Martha take the case to court, but they lose. Their reputation is ruined, their friendship is fractured, and Karen worries that her relationship with her fiancé, Joe, is destroyed. In a surprising turn, Martha admits that she has always felt a romantic love for Karen, and she is overcome with guilt — she blames herself for the entire mess and for Karen’s broken engagement. Her realization of her own sexuality, too, proves to much for her to deal with, and she hangs herself.

At the time, it was illegal for homosexuality to even be mentioned on stage; the play, however, was a commercial and critical success, so revered that the law was not enforced. That didn’t mean the theater communities in other cities were as accepting of the show; the play was banned in Boston and Chicago. The same year the play opened in London, two years after it premiered in New York, William Wyler directed a film adaptation. Retitled These Three, the film, with a script by Hellman, changed the central conflict to a love triangle between Joe and the two women; the Hays Production Code at the time prevented the lesbian theme to be included in the film.

In 1961, Wyler adapted the play again, this time with a screenplay by John Michael Hayes which kept the original plot and lesbian theme. Starring Audrey Hepburn as Karen, Shirley MacLaine as Martha, and James Garner as Joe, The Children’s Hour is a good, if a bit melodramatic, drama that depicts how an unfortunate combination of gossip and a puritanical culture can destroy innocent lives.

But more importantly, was it good for the gays? Let’s break it down.

The Pros: Let’s just say that there isn’t much of a gay “theme” here. The women’s sexuality really has nothing to do with the story (not until the very ending, that is); rather, Hellman’s play and Wyler’s film simply invokes the idea of homosexuality to incite the moral panic of the students’ parents.

The Cons: Well, really, all of it is kinda bad. But let’s start at the most natural spot: Martha’s “coming out” scene.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbvfSGZzR9w]

It’s an absolutely heartbreaking scene, and one in which MacLaine delivers an astounding performance. What really hits me hard is how upset Martha is — she feels an incredible amount of guilt, blaming herself for destroying their reputations and ruining Karen’s relationship with Joe. But she also hates herself and what she is, what she has tried to hide from everyone including herself. She expresses guilt as if she has done something — anything — wrong, when in fact she hadn’t at all.

And Karen, as lovely as she is (it’s hard not to like Audrey Hepburn, really), responds in such a weird way: she’s convinced that Martha is just “tired and worn out,” that she’s not “guilty” of being a lesbian because she’s not gay. She rushes out after Martha admits her secret, and she’s naturally crushed when she returns to Martha’s room to find her hanging from the rafters. But Karen’s response to Martha’s breakdown is tragic, too, because she offers no real comfort when Martha screams that she feels so “sick and dirty.”

A valuable appendix to The Children’s Hour is the incredible documentary The Celluloid Closet, based on the book by film historian Vito Russo. In an interview for the documentary, MacLaine admits that at no point during the filming of The Children’s Hour did Wyler discuss with either her or Hepburn the lesbian themes. “We didn’t do the picture right,” she laments. “We were in the mindset of not understanding what we were basically doing.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=429gotnYSt0]

The Verdict: This is an easy one. As interesting and well-written The Children’s Hour is, it misses a major mark. It’s not really a queer movie at all, because no one involved in the film made an effort to understand the queer experience. It was simply a plot device, nothing more, but that dramatic scene still has an endearing effect on those who watch it.

At the end of the clip from The Celluloid Closet above, feminist and queer activist Susie Bright admits how harrowing the scene still is. It’s true: The Children’s Hour is tragic, not because of how slander can ruin lives but because of how upsetting — and incredibly recognizable — Martha’s admission of guilt really is. That’s the film’s major flaw. Many queer people still live in environments in which they are told that they are “sick and dirty,” either by those they know or the images of other queer people in film and TV. Martha’s outburst of self-loathing is all too familiar because it reiterates a lot of what we are told and tell ourselves, and still represents a major hill over which we have to climb to gain acceptance not just from everyone else — but also from ourselves.